The heart garden

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To anyone interested in Australian art, the name Sunday Reed is
synonymous with the evolution of modernism. Like no one else,
Sunday Reed personified that notion of the patron as friend and
loyal supporter of the artist. Her association with many
significant painters, among them Sydney Nolan, Albert Tucker,
Arthur Boyd and Joy Hester, was more than aesthetic and monetary;
it was personal, sometimes - certainly in the case of Nolan -
passionate and reckless.

As with Janine Burke's other non-fiction books, many of which
have also been concerned with the Heide circle, The Heart
Garden evokes in great detail the milieu of modern Melbourne,
its social dynamics and its more than slightly incestuous art
scene.

Burke has structured the book in such a way that it is not only
a biography of Sunday Reed, detailing her life with her husband
John Reed and their association with the Australian art scene of
their time, but also the story of the creation of Heide as a social
and creative place, as a home, a gallery and a public garden.
The Heart Garden of the title was a small garden created by
Sunday as a poem of love for Nolan.

While the role that Heide has played in the origin of Australian
modernism is well known, especially the fact that Nolan painted the
first Ned Kelly series there on Sunday's kitchen table, the
personal circumstances in which much of the art of Nolan and
Hester, as well as that of other lesser-known artists such as Sam
Atyeo and Nadine Amadio, was created has always been more
obscure.

Sunday, like the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, was
influential on the art of her time as much through her wealth as a
patron as the force of her personality and the demands of her
sexuality. Her romantic interest in certain artists and her
husband's tacit approval of the liaisons, meant that much of the
art created by the Heide circle is energised with emotional
subtext.

In many ways, Heart Garden reads like a romantic
19th-century novel, filled with conflicts and adventures. Sunday,
born into the wealthy Baillieu family, marries an American "cad",
escapes with him to Paris, where she discovers that not only has he
been unfaithful, but he has infected her with gonorrhoea, which
leads to her having an hysterectomy. Then she returns to Australia
to find herself at odds with her family and so leads a rebellious
life, associating with artists and communists, conducting affairs
and spending the money of her inheritance on cultural projects that
wouldn't meet with her family's approval.

Yet Burke, while engaging fully with the emotional fluidity of
Sunday's life, is also telling another story, the story of the
correspondence between personal relationships, their emotions and
ambitions, and the making of art.

It is this other story and its implications that is intriguing.
Its suggestion is that, in effect, Sunday Reed, as a well-placed
patron and as an influential personality, shaped the course of
certain artists' development and so shaped the course of modern
Australian art. The centre-piece of this story is Nolan's famous
Kelly series: "The Kellys are Sunday and Nolan's swansong; the last
brilliant burst of their creative duet." Burke describes how Sunday
would be beside Nolan as he painted. Sometimes he would put his arm
around her, while painting with his other hand. She once confided
that "she felt that they conceived his art when he was inside of
her".

That Sunday was infertile as a consequence of the gonorrhoea
infection makes this characterisation of the creative relationship
between Nolan and Sunday restorative. Sunday is not merely a muse,
rather she is a woman once again fertile and a co-creator - the
mother - of Australia's most iconic artwork.

The Kelly series, still in the possession of the Reeds, would
later become a bargaining chip used to try to win back Nolan's
friendship after he broke it off with them and married Cynthia - a
writer and John Reed's embittered sister. Eventually the Kelly
series was donated to the National Gallery in Canberra. Sunday
decided that it should be displayed with a plaque that would read:
"With love from Sunday Reed."

In this accomplished biography, Burke recounts the life and
times of Sunday Reed in such a way that it can be seen as a
microcosm of creative life in early modern Australia. Burke's
research evokes with subtlety and depth the influence that one
woman can have on the artists and art of her beloved country.

John Mateer is an art critic and poet. His most recent
book, Semar's Cave: An Indonesian Journal, is published by
Fremantle Arts Centre Press.